Hirst’s Druggy Spots Circle World in 11 Gagosian Shows: Review

By Martin Gayford -
Jan 12, 2012

Damien Hirst’s spot paintings may be
a metaphor for something: the contemporary, globalized world,
perhaps.

They are all over the place and come in endless variations.
They are basically the same: equally cheery, boring, lively and
meaningless. So it seems fitting that they are the subject of
what might well be the world’s most far-flung exhibition.

“Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011” opened
yesterday and runs simultaneously in all 11 Gagosian Galleries,
from Hong Kong to Beverly Hills, via Athens, Rome, Geneva, Paris,
London and New York (through Feb. 18).

The artist is offering a signed spotty print to anyone who
completes the polka-dot marathon. Globetrotters must register
online first and visit each of the venues.

To do so would certainly be a metaphor for modern travel:
thousands of air miles, innumerable hours spent in departure
lounges, all to look at a standardized product.

Hirst long ago explained the principle behind the series.

“The grid-like structure creates the beginning of a system,”
he said. “On each painting, no two colors are the same. This ends
the system; it’s a simple system.”

Mind you, over the years he has rung the changes with an
ingenuity that verges on manic. Personally, I passed on the
intercontinental join-the-dots tour, and instead dropped into the
two London exhibitions at Gagosian, 6-24 Britannia Street and 17-
19 Davies Street.

There the viewer is confronted with chromatic discs of all
sizes. Some are massive, with just four on a huge canvas. Others
are tiny, no bigger than the pharmaceutical pills they are
intended to resemble.

Pharmaceutical Titles

Hirst’s original title for the series was “The
Pharmaceutical Paintings.” Hence the titles -- “Butopyronoxyl”
(1996), “N-T-Boc-L-a-Aminobutyric Acid” (1995) and so on, and on.

The idea is that just as today one can adjust one’s
emotional state with a suitable chemical, so the spots seem to
project joyous feelings. Actually, of course, they are just
colors, expressing nothing.

The pigments are scattered on surfaces of all conceivable
shapes and dimensions: square, oblong, triangular, irregular
trapezoid and spherical. There is a wide-screen spot epic the
size of Monet’s largest “water-lilies” and many others so minute
they have space for only a dot and a half or a solitary spot.

Of the two exhibitions, the one at the smaller, Davies
Street branch is the more engaging, since it’s devoted to spot
miniatures, 48 of them sprinkled around the walls of a single,
compact room. There’s something witty, as well as slightly insane
about these micro, mono spots.

Painting Postmortem

Part of the original point was Hirst’s belief that painting
was dead as a medium, together with his urge to make pictures
anyway. These were supposed to be postmortem art: semi-mechanized
abstraction.

As it turned out, the demise of painting was (again) greatly
exaggerated. Hirst, presumably having changed his mind, has tried
-- and failed -- to make some powerfully expressive hand-executed
oil paintings himself.

Once, say about 1995, his spot works seemed to catch the
zeitgeist, at once energetic and nihilistic. That time has
passed.

Now, they seem to capture something less desirable -- the
cheery cynicism of an era that has not so much passed as
collapsed.

The project of creating unlimited paintings, executed by
assistants, all derived from the same formula, seems to reflect
the years of the dotcom boom and subprime mortgages all too
accurately. Now the atmosphere is much more sober and earnest.
Perhaps it’s time for some real paintings.

(Martin Gayford is chief art critic for Muse, the arts and
leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his
own.)

To contact the writer on the story:
Martin Gayford in London at martin.gayford@googlemail.com.